“But Pechman is doing the funeral,” Catherine pointed out. “Mr. Porter would never allow that if he thought Pechman had something to do with Amy’s death.”
Henry shrugged. “I doubt Mr. Porter thinks Pechman actually did something to Amy. There’s a difference between being cautious and outright accusing someone of a crime.”
Catherine thought of her parents, of their shifting discomfort, the gradual way they’d left the church. Not a hard break, nothing dramatic, but those slow backward steps you took when you didn’t know for sure. And then there was that scream she’d heard from down the street. The pain in it like the raw edge of something just broken. She couldn’t imagine anyone thinking logically through that kind of agony. Couldn’t imagine them thinking at all.
“Maybe you could talk to them,” Andrew suggested, nodding toward Catherine. “I mean, you’ve seen Amy’s parents since it happened, right?”
“Actually, no,” Catherine said, slightly uncomfortable now. “From what I’ve heard, they don’t really want to talk to people right now. And to be honest, we’ve never been that close.”
“But I thought you and Amy—”
“Oh, Amy and I were,” she said, “but not so much with her parents. They weren’t mean or anything, but I had this, sort of, discretionary fund to keep Amy entertained and we kind of went over it. A lot. All the baking. And I didn’t really care how much Amy baked or ate or whatever so sometimes she’d get sick and her mom would tell me off. In a nice way, but still. Like if Amy was sick the next day, I’d wake up to a text from her mom or something.” Catherine shrugged. “Plus she always wanted us to get out and do stuff and Amy would just rather stay home and chill out and I thought that was fine. None of this was major stuff. I mean, we got along okay. But still, I would feel weird calling them. And I definitely wouldn’t want to ask them who they think killed Amy.”
“Why did Amy get sick?” Andrew asked.
“She had a weak stomach. Maybe lactose intolerance or something, we weren’t sure. Points for irony. She’d always tell me this story of a chef she’d heard about who was allergic to spices and would break out in hives just using, like, black pepper. She said it could be worse.”
Andrew turned back to Henry. “So that’s why you think Pechman killed Amy? Because he was abusing her?”
“I think it’s possible, yeah.”
The car fell silent. Catherine looked past Henry, out the driver’s-side window. It offered a long view of the land: the misty gray-green edges of the trees, mountains stretching into the sky, their tops white. The winter sunlight was brittle in its intensity. It shot against her eyes through the glass.
“She would have told me,” she said. “I would have known.”
But Henry just gave her a strange look, and she knew what he was thinking.
Did you tell her? Did you tell me? Did she know? Did I?
Her thoughts must have shown on her face because Henry spoke quickly, as though to soothe her. “It might not have been that. She might not have been a victim. Maybe she was—I don’t know—a witness. Maybe she just saw something, overheard something. Something she didn’t even understand at the time but Pechman knew she’d seen or heard something, and he just got more and more nervous, wondering if she’d figure it out and tell someone.” Henry paused as though considering something. “And you know, it might not have even been Pechman that did it. Pechman knows everyone in town. It could have been…I don’t know, someone else on his orders. Maybe he didn’t want to get his hands dirty. Maybe they weren’t supposed to even kill her, just talk to her alone, find out what she knew. And then they found out that she did know something and it got out of hand. But you said”—he turned to Andrew at this—“that Bob said she was strangled, right?”
Andrew nodded.
“Well,” said Henry, with that touch of impatience again, “can you think of a better way to silence someone?”
That night, she dreamt of Amy.
It wasn’t the first time. She’d had, on occasion, rather ludicrous dreams involving Amy and some baking mishap: They were making a cake only to open the oven and find it full of flour that poured out and turned to snow that melted all over the hardwood just as Amy’s mother got home. Or she’d somehow allowed Amy to eat three gallons of Cold Stone ice cream and Amy vomited blue remnants of cotton candy flavor while Gordon Ramsay scolded them both over a recording system.
But this dream was different: She was sitting up in bed with the sheets folded neatly to her waist, covering her legs. She stared straight ahead as though waiting for something. The clock read eleven at night. She watched the red numbers, waiting for the clock to change, to read 11:01, but then there was a scratching sound and she turned only her head to the left, her palms soft and flat against the coverlet.
A tree was scraping one thin branch down the pane, reaching the bottom only to rise up again, making a thin, reedy noise that roused her from bed like an alarm. She stepped with bare feet onto the floor and walked over to the window, watching the tree move slowly up and down, almost keening now, and she reached out a hand as though to ward it off. But the moment her fingers touched the cool glass, the spindly branch froze, thickening and lightening, becoming something altogether different: an arm locked at the elbow, a small palm flat against the glass.
“Let me in!” A face hovered beyond the arm outside her window. Too white to be real, long and ghostly. More air than substance, but the voice was true. “Please, let me in!”
“No,” Catherine said. She took her own hand from the window. “No, I will not!”
“Please,” the voice begged. The face was ghastly, stretched, the eyes so dark they were like holes against a backdrop of skeletal branches. “Please. I lost my way in the trees but I found it! I found you! Please, let me in.”
The hand began to scramble at the window, pulling it up. Catherine tried to wrench the window back down, a low wail coming from her throat but nothing more because she couldn’t scream. Finally, the ghost managed to thrust its hand through the narrow gap it had made and grasped Catherine’s wrist.
She felt as though she had been stabbed through with a knife. She cried out, twisting, but the scalpel-like fingers were clawing, drawing blood that burned its way down her skin.
“Let me go,” she begged. “Let me go!”
“Cathy,” the face behind the window said. “You have to look.”
The face was solidifying somehow, becoming human. Familiar.
Blood dripped down Catherine’s arm. The girl hanging in midair amid the trees began to fade back into them.
“No,” Catherine breathed. “No.”
“Look,” a ghostly Amy told her. “Look.”
Catherine woke up gasping, her hand at her chest, sucking in air as though she’d been drowning. She wiped her face and got out of bed, moving toward the window. The scene outside reminded her of a body: the bones of branches and land that stretched across the earth like a layer of skin. She put a hand to the window, staring at the glass very hard, wondering if she was imagining the marks on it. She shivered and pulled her nightgown around herself. When she turned to look at the clock, she saw it was just past two in the morning.
* * *
—
Andrew’s sleep, though free of nightmares, was hardly restful. He spent most of the night twisting under heavy blankets in the guest bedroom of Bob and Minda’s house, his window facing the overgrown front yard and mailbox, slightly tilted, from that time Minda had been late to work and backed down the driveway too quickly.
“I am a gastroenterologist,” she’d told Bob with a solemn air through the car window as he rubbed his eyes. “If I’m late for a Crohn’s patient in a flare, you have no idea the cleanup involved.”
That had been when Andrew had stayed with them this past summer, interning at the police station, which had been a surprisingly relaxed job
. Mainly Andrew delivered things—memos in manila envelopes, bad black coffee, sometimes handwritten witness statements, which would have been interesting to read if Andrew could have deciphered them. But he hadn’t minded; it wasn’t the worst way to spend five hours a day. He had wished at the time for more excitement, for Bob to be a higher-up officer who did more than respond to library calls and traffic accidents.
Now he wished he hadn’t.
U okay?
A text from his mom flashed on his phone. Six in the morning and she was already texting him, half her words always abbreviated to letters.
How r things?
Andrew sighed and typed a response.
Fine
I’ll be home for New Years.
Minda says u r helping Bob. U can stay as long as u like.
Good experience.
Andrew turned on the lamp and in the mirror he could see his reflection. Not clearly in the dim light, but enough to know he looked sick. He felt a little sick too, but that wasn’t surprising. He’d been feeling sick for a week now, ever since that night in the dorm.
Looking back, it felt like a dream he remembered just enough to know it was a nightmare: seeing Catherine frozen in place, one hand at a closed door, her eyes dazed under the glare of the hallway lights, so pale she seemed translucent. Black makeup under her eyes. The tag of her dress at her throat.
He’d told himself it wasn’t real. That she wasn’t real. But then he went to her and she ran from him and he took one step down the hallway after her, and another. His feet were bare, the tiles cool on his skin, and wet. He stopped, lifted one foot, and looked at the underside, swiped his hand across his skin. It came away dark at the fingertips. He turned and looked back at the door she had been standing against: four or five droplets of blood against the pale tile, and a smeared half footprint that was his own.
That was when he knew it was not a dream. What had happened to her was as real as her blood on his skin, copper-smelling and slick. It made his own blood pound inside him and when he knocked on the door she’d come out of, it was with a profound and terrible guilt, as though he had been the one to make her bleed.
Andrew pressed the heels of his hands into his eyes for a long moment, then released them, blinking as the sun came up gold outside the guest room window and the trees cast long black shadows in protest.
* * *
—
When Catherine walked downstairs, her parents were waiting in the kitchen, her mother wrapping a shawl around her shoulders, her bleary-eyed father drinking coffee.
“You look nice,” he said when she came down the stairs.
“Thanks.” She pulled her hair from the collar of her dress and shifted her feet. It had felt strange, getting dressed to go to the Sunday-morning service. “Henry says they still have those donuts afterward.”
Her mother’s mouth softened. “You’ve been spending quite a bit of time with him.”
“Who?”
“Henry.”
“We’re friends.”
“You two,” her mother said, “were never friends.”
Baffled, Catherine stared at her. “We were friends for years.”
“I wouldn’t call it friendship, what you two had.”
“What would you call it, then?”
Her mother shook her head. “I don’t know. I don’t have a word for—”
“Shouganai,” her father said.
They both turned to look at him.
“It’s Japanese,” he said, his eyes focused on a point just beyond Catherine’s shoulder. “It means it cannot be helped. I used to think that, looking at you and Henry. As though I was looking at something inevitable.”
Her mother rolled her eyes and plucked his coffee mug from his hands. “This happens every time he does his Japanese unit with his students. Comes home with all these unpronounceable words that don’t translate to English.”
“Yugen,” he continued, even as Catherine’s mother began rinsing the mug over a loud stream of water. “The profound, mysterious sense of—”
But Catherine didn’t hear the rest. The sound of the water had raised goose bumps on the back of her arms, made her swallow as she remembered that cup thrust into her hands, that one mouthful of warm tap water.
The water shut off. She blinked. “We should go,” she said finally, pretending to look at the clock on the stove. “We’re going to be late.”
* * *
—
She spotted Henry almost as soon as she got out of the car in the church parking lot. He was standing on the steps before the large wooden doors, talking to his parents. Bracing herself, Catherine walked toward them, her parents flanking her, and when she reached Henry and his parents, he took her hand briefly, as though to steady her.
What word had her dad used? She couldn’t remember it now.
Cultural appropriation, she thought sternly. That was the word for it. He was just being dumb. Forget it.
But still—
What did it mean, that translation? It cannot be helped?
She turned from Henry to his parents, who were greeting hers. Henry had gotten most of his looks from his mother, and just enough of his father’s height to top out at five-nine. His mother had delicate features and a full mouth; his father was taller, with graying blond hair and dark eyes.
“Hello,” Catherine said, nodding her head so low it was almost a bow.
“And to you.” Henry’s mother was wearing a dress of deep purple, her short blond hair cropped close around her fine-featured face. She was eyeing Catherine with a smile so insincere it seemed like an insult to her intelligence. “You look well.”
“Thank you.”
Henry’s mother gave a deep sigh and turned to her husband. “It’s quite cold, should we…?” And without waiting for a response, she joined a group of people making their way through one of the tall doors.
Henry turned to Catherine. “Is Andrew coming?”
“I texted him. Maybe he’s late?” She turned and looked across the parking lot.
“I don’t see him,” Henry said, scanning over her head. “Should we…?”
She nodded and they followed their parents into the church. It looked almost exactly as Catherine remembered: everything brown and wooden, the ceiling impossibly high, stiff-looking pews and impressive stained-glass windows. The sun shone through them now, casting splashes of scarlet and gold and navy across the aisles.
“So what is the plan, exactly?” she asked in a low voice.
“We go to church,” Henry said. “You try not to burst into flames—”
“And you try not to be so—I don’t know—sanctimonious.”
“There she is, Ms. Four-Year College.”
“Shut up.”
He grinned, then lowered his voice even more. “Joking aside? Basically, we just watch out for Pechman.”
“Watch out for what, exactly?”
They began to file into a pew on the right-hand side, after their parents.
“Anything,” he said as they took their seats. He reached for a Bible in the little built-in shelf at the back of each pew and opened it to the front to find a yellow brochure. “Today’s program,” he said. “Here.”
She took it from him and glanced at the sermon message, which was in the middle of the front page, below the church’s logo: First Faith, with a dove pictured between the words, an olive branch in its beak.
Sunday, December 29, 2019
MESSAGE
Life in Death, Faith in Christ
VERSES
1 Thessalonians 4:13–14
Brothers and sisters, we do not want you to be uninformed
about those who sleep in death,
so that you do not grieve like the rest of mankind, who have no hope.
For we believe that Jesus died and rose again,
and so we believe that God will bring with Jesus
those who have fallen asleep in Him.
John 5:28–29a
Do not be amazed at this, for a time is coming
when all who are in their graves
will hear His voice
and come out.
An image came to Catherine’s mind then, of a hand at her window, Amy’s voice, horribly distorted, begging to be let in.
She thrust the program back at Henry, who took it just as John Pechman came into view.
He entered from a small door set to the side, near the musicians (piano and flute and violin), and began to walk toward the podium. His eyes were alight behind wire glasses, his suit jacket dark, his shoes unshined, and Catherine took all this in with Amy’s words reverberating in her head like the violin strings under the bow.
You have to look.
I am, she thought back, gripping her phone so tightly the screen flashed on, the time glowing in white numbers. Amy, I’m looking as hard as I can.
The trouble was, as Pechman began talking to the congregation, kind and slow and thoughtful, Catherine thought of the cut she’d given Andrew, of a ghost talking to her behind glass, and wondered if she could trust her suspicions at all. If they were justified, or if they were merely the products of nightmares, both real and imagined.
The donuts were better than she remembered.
Catherine held hers with a napkin as she chewed. Had she and Amy ever tried to make donuts? No, she remembered. You needed a special pan for that, and Albertsons hadn’t sold them.
“So,” Henry asked her. “What do you think?”
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